Krebs nabs ‘RSA attack’ list

When RSA’s network security was breached earlier this year, the result wasn’t only the replacement of its SecurID tokens all over the world.

At the time, specialists believed that similar techniques could have been deployed against other victims who mostly didn’t go public. Only a handful of stories confirmed the use of information gained in the “RSA hack” to other targets – such as Lockheed-Martin and L-3 Communications.

Now, Krebs On Security has published a list of networks that carried attack traffic of some kind, either because hosts on the networks were compromised, because malicious traffic traversed the networks from other sources, or because researchers were building infected machines to observe their phone-home behaviour.

Most of the command servers were in China, he writes, with a handful in South Korea, the USA, Brazil, India, Italy, Pakistan and the UK.

As Krebs notes publishing the list, it has to be interpreted carefully. It would, for example, be unfair to assume that Trend Micro or Cisco’s IronPort business were compromised when they were more likely to be researching the attacks. Even so, his report states that around 20 percent of America’s Fortune 500 companies are on the list (keeping in mind, however, that some of those are the likes of Cisco, or telcos whose networks weren’t compromised but whose customers were).

The analysis is based on sources of traffic being sent back to the control machines used in the attack against RSA, and identified traffic sources by their AS names (that is, the names by which the networks advertise their routes).

Krebs notes the presence of names like Facebook, Amazon and Wells fargo on the list, as well as government departments in several countries, and a bunch of academic networks.